


put your hands on me

by fanfictionandcats



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, F/M, First Time, Gen, Teen Angst, closet makeouts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-08
Updated: 2013-12-21
Packaged: 2017-12-25 22:57:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/958594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fanfictionandcats/pseuds/fanfictionandcats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He was going to drink and smoke and fuck his way to an early grave. No one cared enough to stop him. </p><p>She’s lost. So she retreats inside herself, she is quiet and calm and composed. She doesn’t feel anything."</p><p>→ (sleeping hook; modern high school au)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. introduction

**Author's Note:**

> basically i love sleeping hook and high school AUs are always fun!
> 
> i'm relatively new to this pairing, so please be kind ~

** (introduction) **

****

He’d been born on the wrong side of the tracks.

****

And then left there.

****

He ran away from his foster home at eleven. Hitched rides to somewhere warmer, near a beach, near the ocean. Getting by, stealing, tricking, trading, and lying. He learned the streets, slipping through cracks, faceless. His skin toughened. Sometimes he slept in the back of the air-conditioned church, until one night someone found him and took him to the homeless shelter.

****

He was put back in the system.

****

He hated it. He wasn’t meant to have a home. He was meant to wander, his legs itched to move, to run, and he didn’t answer to anyone.

****

By fourteen, he’d gathered a group of like-minded poor boys, and set out to become a public menace. Dangerous, raging vengeful fire ran through his veins. He danced at the edge of cliffs, played catch with grenades, bit off more than he could chew. Through the darkened streets they’d ride on stolen bikes, marauding about and pillaging whatever they could get their hands on.

****

And then he met her.

****

She was older, more experienced, and she captivated him. She put the stars in his sky and he worshipped her for it. He cut her name into his arm, and gritted his teeth to stop from tearing up at the pain (because really he was still a boy, and she was a woman, and he wasn’t ready).

****

But she had a boyfriend.

****

When he found out it was Gold, Captain of the Chemistry club, he’d been overjoyed. And he took what was his, claiming his rightful woman from the clutches of the potion-nerd. He had won.

****

Two weeks later Gold got a gun, and shot a bullet through his palm, and one grazed Milah’s ear. There was smoke in the air that night, and blood in his mouth.

****

They ran straight into a police patrol.

****

That’s when they took her away (10 years for possession, a bag of white stashed in the inside pocket of her leather coat). Without a goodbye. She vanished.

****

He found Blue to stitch him up, knowing that he couldn’t go to the hospital. The hospital meant co-pays and bills and registration, none of which he could afford. She took pity on him, did everything she could, but it wasn’t enough.

****

For a month he was lost, blindly wandering with no destination and no idea of the road either.

****

But something dark bubbled inside him, coiled around his chest, and wove its way deep inside his mind.

****

He wanted to hurt people.

****

So he did. Switchblade in his coat pocket, he slinked in the dark between alleys and crack houses and seedy, back-door clubs. He took advantage of younger girls with easily manipulated minds, weak, naive, and he broke them, laughed in their faces, and stabbed their boyfriends.

****

A heart thief, keeping them tucked away in his back pocket, devouring that innocence and turning it to ash.  

****

He was going to drink and smoke and fuck his way to an early grave.

****

No one cared enough to stop him.

****

\+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

****

She was born Aurora Melody Rose, heiress to the Rose Family Fortune, first and only daughter of Jack and Willa Rose.

****

Her life was ballet lessons, macaroons in the foyer, and braiding her hair.

****

Mother and father refused to take her to the playground. Too many germs, other (uncouth) children, too many metal bars and sharp edges for her to bang her head on. She watched the other kids run off together towards the direction of the playground on Sunday afternoons with her nose pressed against the glass of her second-floor bedroom window.

****

She walked on her tiptoes, desperately trying to emulate her mother’s effortless glide, but ends up tripping and falling flat on her face.

****

At age seven, she tried to draw a mural of butterflies across the wall opposite from her bed. Her mother screamed and her father took away her paints for a whole month.

****

For her eighth birthday, her uncle buys her a white rabbit. It’s white and furry and small. She names it Nosey.

****

When she turned fifteen, she met Phillip. It was love at first sight.

****

He held her hand, made her heart flutter, kissed her cheek at the end of their first date. He charmed her parents, he wrote little love-notes and stuck them in her locker between classes. He asked her to the sophomore dance, bought her flowers, told her she was breathtaking. He was everything she ever wanted. She was the luckiest girl in the world.

****

Then the world shattered.

****

A slighted ex-co-worker torched her father’s companies, one after another, with accusations of fraud and slander. Her father was tired all the time, staying up all night with the men in grey suits from his office, sorting through paperwork and files and numbers that made his head spin. Her mother was distant, unable to help, unable to support, and drew inward.

****

They sent her to France for the year while they “work everything out”. She screamed and cried and threw a shoe, having a hissy-fit-tantrum at the prospect of leaving her one true love for an entire year. The fact that they don’t even raise an eyebrow makes it worse.

****

So she’s put on a plane by an armed bodyguard, watching her life disappear, her forehead leaned against the plane’s square window as her eyelids droop closed.

****

She goes to classes in silence. She eats dinner with a few girls from her grade, but says little, watching them chatter animatedly in a language that isn’t her native one.

****

It’s like she’s living someone else’s life, like she’s dreaming, like she’s asleep.

****

It is Phillip, in the end, who gets her home. He convinces his parents to talk to hers, and she’s not sure how, but they agree to bring her back to America. When she wakes up, the plane’s landed, and he’s waiting for her at the airport. She runs into his arms and hugs him tightly.

****

But things have changed. Nosey is dead, buried in a cardboard box in the backyard. Her old friends have moved on without her. When they arrive back at his house, another girl is waiting in his room, knee-deep in his collection of video games.

****

He is still sweet, still kind, but his touch is too light on her skin. She needs more, but he doesn’t give it to her.

****

A few days later, he tells her about the internship. He’d be gone for four years to study business in his father’s company’s branch in Australia. No reliable internet, or phone. And she was still in highschool, still at home.

****

He’d broken up with her, so considerate and polite it was cruel. She cried for the rest of the summer.

****

She’s lost. So she retreats inside herself, she is quiet and calm and composed. She is her mother, gliding and unruffled and controlled.

 **  
**She doesn’t feel anything.


	2. one

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When she walks by, nose in the air, expensive totebag on her shoulder, he can’t take his eyes off her. A lavender butterfly clip holds the wavy light brown hair that tumbles down her back as she floats by him.
> 
> “Who is that?”

 

**one**

 

He spots her sometime in the first week of school. He’s leaning up against the row of lockers with Jefferson, the morning’s coffee and cigarettes still lingering in his mouth.

When she walks by, nose in the air, expensive totebag on her shoulder, he can’t take his eyes off her. A lavender butterfly clip holds the wavy light brown hair that tumbles down her back as she floats by him.

“ _Who_ is _that_?”

He tilts his head, to scan down her back to her ass.

Jefferson turns to follow his gaze and smirks. “Aurora Rose. Her family’s loaded. She wasn’t here last year, but I guess she’s back.”

“You know her?”

Jefferson shrugged one shoulder. “Sorta. She’s hot. But she doesn’t date.”

He laughed, eyes still following the top of her head as she disappeared down the hallway. “I do love a challenge.”

 

\+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

 

She shoves her French textbook out of the way, rooting around in the back of her locker frantically. The bell’s going to ring soon, and if she’s late for class again she’ll have to serve detention. With the bad kids.

“Ah-ha!” She says happily to herself, hands finally closing around her lucky pink pen. She closes her locker quickly, and walks straight into a very firm chest.

She looks up at the figure blocking her path, and meets blue eyes.

“Hi.” The guy says smoothly.

He’s wearing a beat-up leather jacket with a plain white t-shirt underneath and faded, ripped up jeans. She can see a neck tattoo peeking up from his shirt collar, but it’s too covered for her to really see.

He looks like a quintessential “bad-boy”, straight down to the crooked smile that screams something between “I-kill-puppies-for-fun” and “I-know-exactly-how-sexy-I-am-babe”.

She never cared for boys like him.

“Uh, hi?” She says apprehensively, moving to sidestep him. He’s one step ahead, blocking her way and putting up his hands as if to stop her.

She glances over his shoulder to see that the hall’s almost completely empty.

“I’m Hook. You are?”

“Late for class.” She knows she should go, but curiosity gets the better of her at the last second. “Wait, Hook? That’s your name?”

“That’s what they call me.” He says proudly, and shifts a little too close to her. “Now what’s yours?”

She hesitates, but then says, “Aurora.”

“Well, it’s nice to meet you Aurora.” He smiles, one of a predator regarding its prey. “What are you doing tonight?”

She’s not anyone’s prey.

“Studying.” She snaps. She moves past him and starts determinedly down the hallway.

But he’s at her side, matching her pace. “Wrong. You’re coming out with me.”

“I don’t think so.”

She starts up the stairs towards the third floor, leaving him following two steps behind.

“What, daddy doesn’t let you associate with lowlives like myself?” He asks, his tone suddenly biting.

Her grip on her binder tightens, and she squeezes her lucky pen. _What a jerk_. He doesn’t even know her. Who’s he to say anything about her father? She whips around, and glares at him, hard.

“I don’t need my father telling me not to associate with you to know that it’s a bad idea.”

“Don’t know unless you try.”

She huffs, pulling open the door to the stairwell and entering the third floor. “I’m not really dating right now.”

“Got a boyfriend?”

A sharp stab of pain nicks her chest, and she shakes her head. He skips backwards ahead of her, feet away from the door to Algebra 2.

He leers at her. “A _girlfriend_? Because you know, she could come too - “

“No! Are you quite finished harassing me now, I’ve got to get to class.”

“Harassing? I thought this was just a conversation between friends!”

She snorts. “We’re _not_ friends.”

“Sorry, sorry, I meant…” He leans in close to her. She feels his breath against his hair, near her ear, and she fights a shiver. “Potential _lovers_. Wink wink.”

As he pulls away, a blush floods her cheeks too fast to stop.

“I-I have to go.”

For a second, he looks thrown, before finally moving out of the way. She adjusts her books, and turns to knob of the door to the classroom.

When she turns back to glare at him a last time, he’s back to that arrogant smirk.

“See you later, love.” He blows a kiss after her. She rolls her eyes, and closes the door behind her.

 

\+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

 

She’s complains about him to Mulan the next day, how he was so brash with her, and _rude_.

“What kind of a name is Hook, anyway?” She opens the air-tight container and mixes up the dressing in her salad. “Is it like… a code name? For what?”

Mulan shrugged, “I don’t know. I don’t know him.”

She spears a half of a grape tomato on the end of her fork. “I don’t remember him.”

“He transferred last year.” Mulan supplies sparsely. “He’s bad news, just ignore him.”

She desperately wants to ask more, but she holds her tongue. Mulan isn’t her friend, she’s Phillip’s.

She eats her salad, idly scanning the cafeteria for Hook, both hoping she never sees him again.

 

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“Throw me a beer.”

He catches it with his left hand, quickly balancing it on his knee and opens the can. He sits his milkcrate next to the wall, leaning his head back on bricks to take a long gulp.

The boys are all here tonight. They dick around for a while, but no one’s really in the mood. It’s not really a mailbox-knocking-over house-egging night.

Him and Jefferson wander “home” sometime after midnight, walking down the middle of the street. They’d become friends a month or so into his first year here, mostly for convenience. They didn’t ask each other about their pasts and they didn’t ask about the future, but he’d been there for everything that happened with Milah and Gold, stole him hospital-grade pain meds, and pretended not to see him cry that night.

Jefferson had been trying to get his little sister back from her foster family for years, as they’d been separated when his parents died. He’d had driven him out to the next town over to see her just after school on her birthday.

They understand each other.

There are no cars around at this time of night usually, that’s just how small the town is.

It’s fucking suffocating.

There’s a boat that’s been on the market for months, a small, three-person sailboat that’s a couple thousand dollars more than he could ever hope to get his hands on. It sits (unfortunately impeccably secured) chained to the pier, begging him to get in it and sail away, far into the ocean, and never come back.

“Oh, hey, how’s it going with the princess?” He asks, shoving at Hook’s shoulder and waggling his eyebrows.

He hadn’t seen her since they’d first spoken. Not consciously, or anything, but it wasn’t like he was gonna seek her out. He had better shit to do.

But when she actually blushed, everything in his head went completely blank. It was... _pretty_.

“It’s going.” He eyebrow-ed back at him, throwing an empty beer can down in front of him and crushing it under his foot.

 

\+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

 

He’s placed in her home ec class, where he proclaims, “I was supposed to be in woodshop!”

They’re paired up together, unfortunately (as fate is never in her favor). She fights a smug laugh when he trudges his way over to their shared table.

“What’s the matter, afraid you won’t be able to keep your bad-ass act up in a frilly apron?”

“What act? Maybe I really am a bad-ass.” He says, popping the collar of his leather jacket at her and winking. “Besides, who said anything about aprons?”

“Well, we _are_ eventually learning to cook in this class.”

“I get along just fine with the pre-packaged stuff.” He drags the chair out from the table, turning it around and sitting in it backwards, leaning his arms on the rim of the back. “But I do, in fact, make a _delicious_ lasagna when motivated to.”

“Well, be motivated. We're being graded together for this.” She straightens her notebook with glossy pink-nail-polished fingertips. “Besides, men who can cook are sexy.”

He froze, turning his gaze slowly. A grin spreads over his face, and he inquires incredulously, “Did you just call me sexy?”

She scoffs. “No, that’s not at all what I meant.”

“I think you did.” He pokes her shoulder. “Oh, you saucy minx you.”

“Shut up.” She snaps, hoping she didn’t pick this time to start blushing.

“And the truth comes out!”

She opens her mouth to protest, but he just talks over her with, “Don’t try to deny it, I understand, I’m impossible to resist!”

“Mr. Jones, please, settle down.”

He shrinks a little back down in his seat, smiling sheepishly. “Sorry Mrs. Patterson.”

The teacher nods, and goes back to the writing on the blackboard. He bounces right back to his annoying, bothersome self.

Biting down a growl of frustration, she stares intently at the desk in front of her.

“So why won’t you date me, again? You never answered.”

“I just got out of a relationship.”

“Still pining after prince charming, hmmm?”

“ _Phillip_ , actually.” She quips.

“Hmmm, I’m sorry, still pining after Phillip.” He sighs quietly. “Too bad. You’re missing out.”

Ten minutes go by of Aurora trying to listen before she realizes he’s drawing on the edge of her notebook.

It’s a heart with his name in the center.

She retaliates childishly by grabbing the pen out of his hand and throwing it down across the room. It skids across the floor a few desks away from them.

She straightens up, smiling victoriously at him, but he just says, “Sucks for you, that was your pen.”

She pointedly ignores him for the rest of class.

When the bell rings, she gathers up her things in a rush, moving as far away from Hook as possible.

The classroom empties, slowly. She spots her pen, and frustratedly collects it. She takes a deep breath, smoothing out her dress as she makes her way toward the door.

She walks right into Hook, and he bumps her shoulder, sending her tipping over into a precariously balanced stack of textbooks. The stack teeters for a moment.

He manages to catch them in time to stop them from falling over completely, but one drops to the ground with a loud thud.

Hook smiles over his shoulder at her, almost apologetically. His one hand balances the stack, and he nods to the book on the ground.

“Can you grab that one?”

She plants her hands on her hips, sniffing in irritation. “You do it, you’ve got another hand.”

As soon as she says it, his entire face changes. The mocking, sarcastic smirk vanishes, replaced by a guarded blankness.  

“It’s crippled.” He replies flatly.

“Ha. Sure.”

He coughs out a humorless laugh.

“I’m not kidding.”

He holds up his right hand silently for her to see. His middle and ring fingers are bent back a little too far, and his pinky finger is rigidly bent. His thumb trembles, but just barely, and in the center of his palm is a mangled wound-looking suture.

Her stomach drops and she stifles back a gasp.

His eyes stare at her like he’s daring her to say something about it, and she darts down to pick up the book.

“Oh. I’m… here. I’ll just put it, here. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.” He replies coldly.

She scrambles for words, but nothing comes out.

He puts the books back and disappears.

 

\+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

 

She doesn’t see him again for weeks. He doesn’t show up to class.

Had he been born with it? No, she didn’t think so, that didn’t make sense. He had a stitched-up wound, he must have gotten hurt. She wonders if it was in some sort of gang-fight or something. Her mind floods with images akin to West Side Story, they’ve already got the leather-jacket thing down.

She’s too curious for her own good.

Ashley invites her (and Mulan) to sit with the girls at lunch again, and so they vacate their old table to join them. She’s grateful, happy to be reconnecting with her friends, but is suddenly distracted when she sees a head of messy black hair out the corner of her eye.

Oh, no, it’s not him.

She’s quiet, picking apart her bread roll into smaller, bite-sized pieces, wondering why she cares so much if she offended him so much that he ditched so as to not run into her.

But that’s pretty self-centered, isn’t it? To assume that just because of a small, misinterpreted comment she made that he would just up and leave. Surely she doesn’t mean that much to him.

They’re not friends. They’re not anything.

“Is something wrong, Aurora?” Ashley asks with her graceful smile, her blond hair piled prettily on top of her head with a blue ribbon. In the seat over, Kathryn Nolan side-eyes her haughtily.

Aurora forces a returning smile. “Oh, no, of course not. I’ve just been feeling a little tired lately.”

It’s a flimsy excuse, but she’s not sure how she’s supposed to answer. She’s not talking because she’s thinking about one of the boys (the boy) who smokes joints outside the liquor store and sets thing on fire just for kicks?

All he does is pester and hassle her. She doesn’t know why she’s not grateful he’s out of her hair for the time being.

Ashley seems to accept this answer, and returns to her conversation with Belle. Mulan does look at her skeptically for a minute, but says nothing about it.

 

\+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

 

She can’t stop thinking about him, and she hates it.

She’s always been this way - easily obsessed. It’s a flaw she very often hates, and no time more than now.

He’s an asshole. Plan and simple, he’s crass and he stares at girls and makes comments and it’s all very “I must be compensating for something”. He is the farthest thing from a gentleman there is, his hair uncombed and messy and sticking up every which way, his skin inked with various illegal tattoos, his eyes dark and challenging.

Though yes, objectively, she would not argue the fact that he was mildly attractive. In a rugged, devil-may-care kind of way. But was she really so shallow to let that overpower his insufferable personality?

She jumps as she hears a loud rustling noise behind her. She worriedly glances over her shoulder, and sees nothing but a few shadows of buildings and the flickering streetlamp.

She’s been walking along by the pier, watching the line of where the sky started and the line of the sea ended.

The docks were, admittedly, in a dangerous neighborhood, but she’d never had any problems before.

Then again, she’d never been here this late.

She feels the hair on the back of her neck start to prickle, and draws her coat in closer to her body.

“H-hello?” She calls behind her, eyeing the corner of the bait store some paces away. “Is anyone there?”

An anxious minute passes, before a hulking, dirt-brown dog bursts out from around the corner. She screams in surprise, echoing flatly in the air as the animal shoves by her, hard. She falls sharply onto her bare knees, the heel of both hands slamming down to catch herself.

She turns around, only to see the four-legged figure disappearing into the shadows again.

She settles down on the pavement for a moment, trying to catch a breath. The bizareness of the last few minutes hits her. For a second, she thought it was going to attack her.

“Aurora?”

She raises her head, blinking away the tears around the corner of her eyes.

It’s him, arms crossed over his black t-shirt. His face regards her with a mix of trepidation and curiosity.

“Why are you on the ground?”

“I - there was this dog, I think, it must have been stray, and it ran right at me.” She mumbles numbly.

He glances around, and then back at her. “Well, it’s gone now.”

He offers her his hand.

She takes it, noticing scabs over his knuckles. It’s the ones you get after you’ve punched someone (she knows that from watching cop and detective shows).

She feels jittery, just the tiniest bit nervous, now that she’s seeing him again, in the way that you do when you’ve dreamt about someone or you caught them doing something they weren’t supposed to be doing.

And he’s been in her head all week.

He lifts her back up onto her feet, and she brushes off the bottom of her shirt, feeling too vulnerable.

“Thanks.”

“You alright?” He asks, surprising her when his voice sounds almost genuinely concerned. “Hurt?”

She shakes her head. Her hands sting a little, but she doesn’t want to whine around him. She can tell he thinks she’s weak already, and doesn’t want to prove him right.

“What are you doing around here anyway?”

She surveys the street, the sunset hue not even enough to make the ripped newspapers and discarded plastic and litter attractive. But to her other side is the harbor, and that makes up for it.

“I was taking a walk. And I like it here by the docks. It’s quiet.” She stares in the direction of where her rock is, dejectedly wondering if he’s going to start fighting with her again. “Why are you here?”

“Same as you.” She notices the side of his shirt collar is ripped. “Still, it’s not really a safe place for a girl like you to be down here alone.”

And he must be right. What else could a person like him be doing around here, if not something destructive and possibly illegal?

“So where’ve you been?” She blurts out.

“Around.” He vaguely gestures behind him. He starts ambling towards the direction of the docks, and she follows him, matching his step.

Because you know, she was going that way anyway.

“Not at school.”

He barks a laugh. “Love, I’ve got better things to do than spending my time in that shithole.”

“Last I checked, school wasn’t optional.”

He grins impishly, “I’m not one to follow rules.”

“Well, you should come. At least to home ec. I’m doing all the work for the both of us.”

He doesn’t reply, tucking his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket and walking a step ahead of her. It feels a little like she’s tagging along after him.

But it’s her walk, and maybe it just so happens that he’s also going to the same place. She refuses to be intimidated away from what she wants to do.

He slows when they arrive at the pier, and hops over the path edge and down onto one of the rocks. His feet are quick and sure, and he pushes himself up onto the flat of a giant, sea-black rock, leaving a space to the right of him. He throws her a glance over her shoulder, beckoning him to join him.

She eyes him warily for a moment, but ultimately climbs down (as gracefully as she can manage). When she scoots up next to him, their shoulders brush.

She definitely does not shiver.

He leans back comfortably on his forearms, kicking his feet back and forth lazily. The toe of his scuffed up black leather boot hits a smaller rock next to them in a quiet rhythmic pattern.

They sit for a moment, the sound of waves crashing against the rocks in front of them. She feels calm and fidgety at the same time, winding the hem of her skirt around her forefinger idly.

“I am sorry, about before, about your hand.” She stutters out. He tenses at her words, but it’s been eating at her for days.

A moment passes and she has this dreaded feeling that she’s ruined everything, but he just nods once, and mutters, “Don’t worry about it.”

“How’d it happen?” As soon as the words come out, she bites her tongue so hard she’s sure it’ll bleed. A terrified pang hits her chest and she fights the urge to slap herself in the forehead. “Oh, wow, that’s really none of my business. You - you don’t have to tell me, I can’t believe I just - “

“I got shot.” He says minimally, stopping her guilty babbling. Nothing in his face changes, but she can tell that’s purposeful. “Right through the palm.”

He hovers his hand over her thigh, face up, and what’s left of the sunlight clings to the raised pink skin in the middle of his hand. It looks like it hasn’t quite healed all the way, but there is evidence that it was stapled uncarefully. She wonders if he tried to do it himself.

Before she can stop, her fingertips ghost over the wound. He doesn’t protest. The skin feels tough and tender at the same time, and she has a distinct feeling of flattery that he’s even let her touch it.

“That must have been awful.” She whispers.

Her gaze shifts up to his eyes, and as her thumb grazes the wound, she can see him imperceptibly shiver. The air between them is suddenly charged, and his face is so close, and he’s looking at her and she’s looking at him and there’s no one around but each other.

“Stings like a bitch, yeah.” He abruptly says just a little too loud, breaking eye contact to stare down at their hands.

There’s a lump in her throat and she’s suddenly deeply confused.

His other hand circles around her wrist, pulling it closer to his face, and his eyebrows crinkle as he scans over the scrape from where she caught herself. “You are hurt.”

“I fell.”

He drops his grasp and her arm flops unceremoniously down onto her thigh. “You should get some band-aids on that.”

The sun has almost completely disappeared now, and he’s looking straight out across the water like he’s determined not to look at her again.

She likes when he looks at her.

She bites her lip, pushing herself off the rock and landing too hard on her feet. She winces, taking a few uneasy steps away. She turns back to him.

“I should be getting home, I…”

He nods once slowly, his chin hitting his chest. “Of course.”

She keeps her eyes trained on him, hoping that if she wills it hard enough, he’ll meet her gaze again. When he doesn’t, she sighs.

“Come to school.” She says tiredly, tiptoeing her way around the large rock, back up to the path.

And he’s recognizable again, with his cocky grin, calling, “We’ll see.”

 

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“Derek says we can’t do it Wednesday, and I agree, just because it’s in the middle of the week and it’s like, who wants to go to a party and get up for school the next day? But Friday isn’t good because cheer practice, and then Saturday I’m supposed to get my nails done, and Sunday is the lord’s day.”

She can feel Mulan rolling her eyes behind her, but she just nods as Rapunzel continues on.

“But like, I really need to get drunk. Sometime soon. And we haven’t had a party in months. So, we need one! Right now, you know?!”

She opens her mouth to respond, but stops and trails off with a, “Um, yeah…”

He’s across the hallway, tossing a crumpled up piece of paper up and down in the air. Emma Swan is rolling her eyes at him, and saying something that makes him laugh.

Her nails dig into her palm and she winces.

“My mom’s home this weekend though. I don’t understand why he wants to do it at my house, he’s got a pool!”

Why’s he looking at her like that?

Emma says something else, this time with a half-smirk, and she has the strangest craving to shove her into the nearest locker.

_What?_

She watches Emma turn on her heel and stomp away, long blond hair flipping into his face in the process. He just smiles after her for a second, before retreating the other way, shoving the crumpled up piece of paper in the back pocket of his jeans.

She’s appalled at herself.

She was feeling _jealous_. For no reason.

When she looks back to her friends, they’re all gone except Mulan. She’s staring at her, puzzled, her hair pulled tightly into a bun on the back of her head, and lips set in a thin line.

“Aurora?”

She blinks her eyes and shoves down the tangy feeling of envy. “Yes, Mulan?”

The other girl looks at her for another moment, before shaking her head. “Never mind.”

 

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He walks his motorcycle out of the tiny parking space given for the vehicle in the school parking lot, narrowly avoiding a squirrel darting out into his path.

He opens down the kickstand with the toe of his foot, pulling up the drooping collar of his coat. The air was just beginning to turn chillier, and he detested the cold.

Aurora flies out of the double-door front entrance of the school building, down the front stairs and onto the path through the lawn. Her bags half-hanging off her shoulder, and she accidentally shoulders a poor freshman boy, hurriedly apologizing before continuing on her way.

A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth despite himself.

She was beautiful. Feisty, too. She’d probably be a good time.

He needs to think of her that way. She is another girl he would like to bang.

He will not think of her in the way that she caressed his palm, the quiet between them, the uneasy expression on her face and the way she whispered, and the way he wanted to tell her more.

He didn’t know why he didn’t just leave. She had no business asking him anything about it.

But she cared. Must be rich girl trait, wanting to fix broken things. And he let her. And deep down, maybe, it felt good to be handled gently.

Before she can pass him, he calls out, “Want a ride?”

She halts in mid-step, and turns towards his voice. She meets his eyes, and smiles thinly. “I’d rather walk, thanks.”

“Too chicken?” He baits, raising one eyebrow.

Mirroring him, she raises her eyebrows, settling one hand on a hip, and regards him with an air of amusement. “You really think that’s going to work?”

“Oh definitely. Chicken.”

He pushes away from the bike, stepping closer to her. She moves a step away.

“I won’t stoop to your level.”

He smiles calculatingly at her before suddenly launching into an array of scarily accurate chicken noises. He dances around her in a circle, poking and prodding her as she slaps his fingers away. People were starting to stare, until she finally embarrassedly squawked, “Alright! Stop!”

“Yes!” He exclaims in victory, grabbing her wrist and dragging her toward the motorcycle.

“I trust you have a helmet?” She asks disdainfully.

“Prissy.” He tosses her the heavy, black helmet, which she just barely manages to catch with both hands. “Here.”

Maneuvering it over to her other hand, she throws one leg over the side in one fell swoop. She straddles the motorcycle, the fabric of her skirt hitching up to display a little more skin of her thigh than usual. Flipping her hair over one shoulder, she turns and looks at him expectantly.

_Jesus fucking Christ._

He shoves in his hands in his pockets.

“Well? I can’t drive.” She says, gesturing to the seat in front of her.

_Get it together, Jones._

He’d seen plenty of girls on the back of his motorcycle. It wasn’t anything new.

Why did she look so good on it?

He settles into his seat, and he sees her put on the helmet out of the corner of his eye. She scoots up, and the inside of her thighs just barely graze his hips. He feels her chest pressed against his back.

He squeezes his eyes shut and takes a breath of self-preservation.

_Cool it!_

“Put your arms around me. And hold on.”

She scoffs. “Obviously.”

_Brat._

He takes off fast, making her scream in surprise. But in seconds, it dissolves into laughter. Happy, light, tinkling laughter. And he realizes he’s laughing too. He’s happy she likes this. He’s happy she’s happy.

They ride through mostly main streets. He knows well enough not to take her through any of the alley-routes he usually uses or down by the docks.

When he turns a corner, she tightens her hold on him, her fingers brushing against the skin just above his  belly button through his t-shirt.

He drops her off a block from her house.

“Oh my god, that was amazing!” She exclaims, voice a little hoarse. Her feet hit the ground alright, but she’s a little shaky and almost stumbles when she first gets off.

His hand shoots out and catch her forearm. She straightens up, eyes bright and hair mussed from the wind. He looks at her for too long.

“I guess I was wrong, you’re not such a chicken after all.”

She steps back away from him, wagging her finger in his face. “Ha! Ha, ha, ha!”

She starts down the sidewalk, backing away from him with a smug smile on her face. He bites at the side of his cheek to stop from grinning too hard.

“So, you on for bungy jumping tomorrow?”

Bouncing away down the street, she calls back, “Bring it on, Hook!”

He watches until she disappears past carefully-trimmed dark green bushes. As he fastens the helmet on, he takes a second to recognize how posh this neighborhood is. The houses and their front yards take up more space than six homeless shelters all lined up on their sides. He stares blankly at the sprinklers on the lawn of the house in front of him.

He bets Aurora’s never stolen a Cup of Noodles from a convenience storer, realized too late that you needed a microwave for it, and gone without dinner one night. She’s different from him.

He shakes his head at himself. It doesn’t matter.

He’s just _flirting_. That’s it.

And if that night he jerks off to the thought of eating her out on the seat of his motorcycle, that’s his own business.

 

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Her parents aren’t home that night, so she binges on left-over spaghetti and oreos, and watches the last twenty minutes of the Notebook, because it’s on.

But she can’t focus, because he’s in her head again.

No, he doesn’t give her butterflies. They’re more like moths - angry, vicious, white moths that slam at her insides like they’re attempting a breakout.

There’s a nagging voice in the back of her head that yells _What about Phillip?!_

She eats another oreo.

Before she falls asleep that night, when she's tired and she's not as good at pushing thoughts away, she wonders what it would be like to kiss him.


	3. two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Who’d you come here with?”
> 
> “Nobody.” She answers unapologetically. “Where’s Maura?”
> 
> “I don’t know.”
> 
> “You should, she’s your date.” She says, but the edge of her words have a bite to them.
> 
> He tilts his head, and she meets his eyes.
> 
> “I didn’t want her to be.” He admits quietly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's been a minute since i've updated. things have been crazy busy and stressful and this is a REALLY long chapter (way longer than the first) so it's taken a while.
> 
> thank you to everyone who left me comments! they're all very sweet ☺

**two**

 

He ducks just in time to avoid a pumpkin getting smashed clean off a deck ledge. Drunken hoots and hollers and a baseball bat clattering to the floor follow after.

He glances back over his shoulder, leaving Jefferson to chat up Ruby by himself. She’s sporting a red leather dress that stops mid-thigh with fishnets, and a coy smile that tells him Jefferson’s probably got a good chance tonight.

The night is cold, even for October, and he fights an urge to shiver. Wandering around the party, he narrowly misses getting grabbed by a drunken “sexy witch”, and more than once gets catcalled at by a “sexy cat” and a Kim Kardashian. He gets pulled into a game of beer pong and undoubtedly wins, but drinks the beer anyway because hey, it’s free beer and the rich kids are buying.

He’s not sure whose house this is, but he bets it has to be one of the guys from the football team, due to the amount of varsity jackets cropping up in groups around the stairs and the covered pool outside (he's unsurprised at the level of originality their costumes show). He’s leaning against the far-side wall of the patio, playing with his lighter, when he sees Aurora.

She wears a pink, floor-length dress with a plastic gold crown bobbypinned into her hair. She sees him before he sees her, and approaches him with a full red cup and a tipsy, playful gleam in her eye.

“Hello princess.” He says impishly.

She raises her eyebrow at him and takes another sip from her cup, winces, and asks, “What are you then?”

“I’m a pirate!” He pulls his eyepatch up over his eye and does a twirl to model off his billowy white shirt and tight leather pants.

Then he grins slyly at her. “Arrrrrr, show me the booty.”

She snorts, but then regains her face into an unimpressed smirk. “How clever.”

“I thought so.” He replies smugly.

She’s smirks at him over the lip of her cup as she takes another gulp of whatever’s in it. “You always think you’re so clever.”

“I _am_ so clever.”

“Rory! There you are!” A tall blond comes crashing in from out of nowhere, throwing herself into Aurora’s arms. Aurora almost topples over from the weight, and Hook goes to help her, but she rights herself quickly, holding the blonde as comfortably as possible.

“Here I am, Ashley.”

“Did - have you seen Thomas tonight? He looks h-o-t as shiiiiiit.”

Ashley smushes Aurora’s cheeks together, giggling and hiccuping. She’s also dressed as a princess, but in a blue dress that’s torn and muddy at the hem.

“You’re so pretty.” She hiccups. She turns head lazily.

“Who is that?” Ashley attempts to whisper, “Yum.”

Hook barks a laugh, while Aurora smiles indulgently at her and shifts her to a standing position.

“Let’s get you some water.” Aurora says, steering her away and back towards the living room.

“Need help?” Hook calls after them.

Aurora nudges open the deck door with her elbow, propping it open with her foot. “We’re fine.”

“Catch you later then, princess!”

He does not, in fact, see her again for the rest of the night. Or maybe he does. Everything becomes blurry after that, quick shots of Jefferson and the other guys chanting “Chug chug chug chug chug!” and drunkenly two-stepping with a girl in a cop outfit.

Halloween is his favorite holiday of the year, and he honors it by celebrating thoroughly.

The last thing he remembers is hanging out of some car’s sunroof with the guys, yelling until his lungs thought they would explode.

 

 

 

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The wind coming in from the waves ruffles his hair in pieces as he scrapes his knife against a stone in his good hand. The rhythmic scraping of sharpening blends into the soft crashing of the waves, and there are voices of loud fishermen, sweating and cursing as they tie up their boats for the day.

He’s trapped in a cycle.

He can see Milah’s face. Her tongue ring, chipped nail polish and tanned skin to match his. Tattoos littered her body, and when she smiled the corners of her eyes would crinkle.

They’d roll all the windows up and hotbox the back of her car, letting the smoke cloud the windows over. He sees it all in flashes, his thumb sliding over her belly button, her biting his neck. She liked when he held her by her throat. The fucking was half the high. Life didn’t exist outside those moments.

Her mother’s in jail and her father lives somewhere in California, and she’s alone like he is. They understood each other from the beginning, when he met her at that underground rave, laughing and smearing paint all over another girl’s stomach.

They are cut from the same fabric, they are the same.

But she’s miles away, gone for years. She shouted for him not to wait - and he promised he would. He tried to visit her, but she wouldn’t see him. That was a year ago.

He’s fucked around, sure. Girls who look at him like they can “tame” him, acting like they’ll mean anything to him next week.

But Milah was - _is_ , she _is_ the only person he has feelings for.

And then he realizes he hasn’t thought of her in days.

And that is when the guilt hits at it’s peak.

Because really, it’s his fault Milah’s gone. It’s his fault that she’s missing years of her life in some hell-hole miles from everything she knows. He got cocky, and she paid the price.

And he is forgetting her. A part of him told him that it was okay to move on, that she told him to, so he should. But a larger part told him that that was a load of shit, and that it was selfish.

He tries to ignore both. It isn’t going so well.

 

 

 

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Aurora burrows her free hand deeper into her coat pocket, the scarf around her neck and the brown boots on her feet not doing enough to warm her up. Her other hand clutches a coffee cup - her favorite, pumpkin spice latte with hints of caramel, and the corners of her mouth turn up of their own accord when she takes a sip.

The weather has been getting steadily colder recently, and the beginning-winter rain is just awful.

She’s always at school early, almost a half an hour before classes start. This way, she has a second to collect herself before everyone else shows up, fix her hair, get her school work together. It takes away the frantic stress of sorting through everything in homeroom.

She’s at the foot of the stone steps when she slows to admire the morning sky. The dark blue is slowly being pushed out by purples, and then pinks, preparing for the inevitable orange and yellow of morning. She looks disdainfully at the artificial-lit streetlights, clashing with the natural colors.

She’s startled out of breath when someone jabs her side, and she whips around, almost pitching right into Hook. She just barely retains a grip on her coffee. Aurora pokes out her hip and glares at him.

“You scared me.”

He grins, but his eyes are sleepy. “Sorry.”

She takes stock of his messy hair, and the way that he keeps blinking so lazily that it looks like he could keel over at any second. She wishes she didn’t find it sortofkindofadorable.

“What’re you doing here so early?” She says, staring down at the top of her plastic-covered cup, playing with the rim of the top. “Or, at all?”

He ignores her and points to the cup, “S’ in that?”

“Coffee - “ Before she can blink, he snags it from her and takes a gulp. “Hey!”

“Hey what?” He smiles at her, satisfied, and hands back the cup.

She scoffs, snatching it back. “Asshole.”

“Language.”

Aurora rolls her eyes, turning on her heel and stomping up the stairs, not completely angry, and happy to feel his eyes on her back as she walks away.

 

 

 

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Her pink thermos sits unopened in front of her, along with the rest of her self-packed-lunch, as she plays with the ends of her hair. She twists a piece tightly around her forefinger until it starts to look whitish-purple, and then releases.

“Teach me math.” Belle says frustratedly, sliding her notebook towards Aurora. She rests her chin on the heels of her hands and pouts.

Aurora squints at the problem for a moment, before smiling and sliding back. “Square both sides.”

“Oh, right. Duh. Thanks.”

She catches a glimpse of a leather jacket from the corner of her eye, and it’s a little pathetic how quickly her head turns.

He’s walking across the cafeteria, and she watches the collar of his jacket and where it hits his neck. He’s got a tiny bit of stubble dotting his cheeks, his jaw, and a little of his neck. _Scratchy._

“Don’t.”

Mulan’s voice startles her, and she turns to her friend. Before she can respond, Mulan continues, “It’s a bad idea.”

“What is?”

Mulan tips her head in the direction of Hook, now talking to some stoner she doesn’t know the name of and grinning, in that stupid smug way he does after he says something he thinks is funny.

She wishes she wasn’t such a bad liar.  “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

Mulan frowns at her impatiently.

“You know he’s a drug dealer, right?”

She didn’t.

“And?”

“And what about Phillip?”

Her fingers tense up into a fist, and something in her chest drops, heavy and angry.

“Don’t talk to me about Phillip.” She snaps, and stands up from the table, shoving her lunch back into her bag.

She can feel tears welling up behind her eyes, why is she such a baby, and walks towards the bathroom.

_Don’t feel guilty. You haven’t done anything wrong. Mulan doesn’t know what she’s talking about._

Mulan doesn’t say anything else for the rest of the day.

 

 

 

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He’s waiting outside the west exit when she walks out, balanced on the railing with a cup in his hand. He wishes she wasn’t taking so long to get out here, ‘cause now he’s had time to rethink things.

Maybe he shouldn’t have gotten it for her. Isn’t that something boyfriends do?

Maybe he should just leave. This isn’t his style anyway.

He pushes himself off the railing and gets a few steps down before the door opens again.

“Aren’t you cold?” Her voice asks as she catches up to him. Her shoulder bumps his for a second and he stops.

“No.” He holds out the cup to her. “Here.”

“What’s this?” She asks, but takes the cup from him and presses her lips to it.

“I owed you some coffee.”

“Thank you.” She looks so surprised. “That’s - This is… really sweet.”

She takes a sip and murmurs an “mmmmmm”, before holding it between her gloved hands and looking back at him. 

He hopes she likes it. It’s not the fancy pumpkin-spice-caramel-thing that she had before (he doesn’t know where she got it and it’s probably unworthily expensive), but it’s how he likes his coffee. He can’t help watching her, the way she licks her lips after she drinks.

She hops down the last step of the stairs, and they start up the sidewalk. He catches Jefferson’s eye across the street, a cigarette at the corner of his mouth. Jefferson nods and winks.

He rolls his eyes at him, and Jefferson laughs.

“Do you want some?” She offers.

“Nah, I got it for you.”

“Okay.”

They keep walking.

She digs into her bag and pulls out her phone. She looks at the screen for a second, and then her face falls. He watches her from the corner of his eye.

_Don’t ask. Don’t ask. Don’t._

“Everything alright?”

She nods, dropping her phone back into her bag. She bites the side of her lip. “Yeah, my parent’s are just going to be out of town for the next few days.”

“And that’s a _bad_ thing?”

She shakes her head slowly, and then laughs angrily. “I don’t know why I’m surprised. They’re gone more often than they’re here these days.”

_At least you know who your parents are._

But he bites this back bitterly, and says nothing. They round the corner of school, and he watches a group of girls pile into a way too small car, laughing and falling all over each other.

Aurora stops, holding her bag strap and looking at him uncertainly.

“Do you mind - I mean, can you give me a ride home?”

“I don’t have my bike today.”

“Oh.”

“I could walk you home, though, if you want.”

He doesn’t know exactly when he started sounding like a pantywaist about everything, but he wishes it would stop. Where was his game?

She seems sort of embarrassed now. “You don’t have to, I don’t - “

“No, ’m happy to.”

People look at her weird when they walk out onto the street together, but he doesn’t seem to notice. Maybe they’re just looking at him, she figures. He _is_ very striking.

“You going to the East keg this weekend?” He asks.

The East keg is a keg party that happens every first weekend of the month, in the middle of the woods. Most of East (the school from the next town over) goes, and usually a lot of people from Storybrooke too. Basically, it's too cold and there’s never anywhere to pee. But everyone gets really drunk and high and usually end up on the news from some crazy situations like starting a fire or stealing a goat or something.

From the little information she knows about him, it would be his kind of scene.

“I heard people die at those.”

He scoffs. “That was only once.”

“Once is too many.” She sniffs. “Besides, it’s so dirty too! People throw drinks and it’s cold and there’s never any space - “

He rolls his eyes. “Alright princess, calm down.”

“Just because I don’t feel like spending two hours shivering in the woods doesn’t mean I’m acting like a princess.”

“You definitely are.”

“Not.”

“Pretty enough to be one, at least.”

She almost completely stops walking.

“Oh my god, you did not just say that.” She says incredulously. But actually, a tiny part of her is sort of flattered that he called her pretty, if only even in a joke. “You can’t think that works, do you?”

“You’re blushing.” He points out smugly.

A hand flies up to cover her cheek. “Shut up.”

“Hook.” A voice calls from somewhere behind them.

Emma Swan stalks up to them, and Aurora feels the smile start to slide off her face.

Emma’s pretty, Aurora thought. She had that long wavy blond hair that constantly looks tousled and she was of average height, not too short not too tall. The only real contact the two girls had had was in third grade. Emma threw a dodgeball at her face and when Aurora started crying Emma had rolled her eyes and grunted out a short “Sorry” and then disappeared.

“Seen Jefferson lately?” She asks gruffly, as if it’s a chore to even be talking to them.

“Nope.” He says shortly.

“Think he’s been avoiding me.”

Hook grins. “Probably.”

Emma loops her thumb into her belt and says, “Well, next time you see him, you tell him he owes me.”

“Anything for you, doll.” Hook says, and winks.

The girls lock eyes for a moment, Emma looking angrily confused. But then she moves past them.

It’s hard for Aurora to stamp down the urge to glare. Who was Emma to be looking at her like that? Aurora thinks defensively. Is Emma interested in Hook? She thinks she’s seen them around together more than once this year.

Hook starts walking again, and she hurries forward to catch up with him. She smiles inwardly when she notices that he remembered how to get to her house from school.

“My parents would never let me go anyway.” She continues, “I went to one when I was a freshmen and ended up covered in beer and smelling like weed.”

“They wouldn’t have to know.” He says obviously. And it’s things like that that makes her wonder what his parents are like. Or even if he has them. He never seems to talk about his family at all.

“I’m not a good liar. Besides, I doubt my parents will be letting me out to do anything for a while.”

“Why?”

She heaves an exasperated breath. “I have a B in French.”

He shrugs. “B’s not bad.”

“I have all As except for that class. And my parents will literally kill me if I have that by the end of the marking period.” She explains. She bites the inside of her cheek and adds bitterly, “And it’s funny, because they don’t actually care about me, just if I’m following what the rules they say.”

He doesn’t say anything back to that, and even though she sneaks glances at his face, she can’t seem to puzzle out what he is or isn’t saying.

They finally stop outside her house, a white-picket-fenced three-story house with a stained-glass rose above the front door. The flowers have mostly all died off by now, but the gardener managed to salvage some perennials, which line the fence modestly.

She turns, one hand on the fence latch, and blurts out, “What are you doing right now?”

He cocks his head, gesturing at the house behind her. “Walking you… home…?”

She laughs. “No, sorry. I mean, like, do you want to come inside?”

She’s astounded at how forward and confident she sounds. It would be an empty house. With just the two of them. She frantically tries to remember if her room’s clean and whether or not her aunts will be home, probably visiting to drop off some dresses or something. They do that freakishly often.

He considers it for a moment, and then pulls a face that says, why the hell not.

“Sure.”

“Okay.” She smiles, and unlatches the fence. He follows her up the stone path through the green lawn, and she holds the front door open for him as he steps cautiously inside. His face changes when his foot hits the inside welcome mat, and she turns away to lock the door so she doesn’t have to see it.

She’s never been embarrassed of her house before, but he looks at it like they’re standing in the middle of the White House.

Sliding past his left shoulder, she hurries past the living room and into the kitchen, waiting for him to follow her again. He does, eventually, but stops in the doorway, hands hovering over the doorframes and staring up at the high, detailed ceiling.

She drops her schoolbag onto one of the chairs at the kitchen table, and then pulls out one of the stools set next to the granite counter.

“Do you have… two ovens?” He asks incredulously, his good hand running over the counter space next to the burners.

“We have three.” She mutters embarrassedly, ducking into the refrigerator.

She bends over and checks for something on the bottom shelf, and she thinks she feels his eyes on her ass. Thrill shoots through her and she doesn’t know why she’s so happy to be objectified this way. But she hopes he likes what he sees.

“Why would you ever need three ovens?”

“I don’t know. I barely ever use one.” She straightens up, holding the heavy fruit in one hand. “Do you want pineapple?”

He raises his eyebrows at her. “Are you going to cut that up? By yourself?”

She seizes a knife from her father’s bamboo knife holder and points it towards his face.

“Got a problem with that?”

He holds his hands up in surrender, looking down the sharp end of the knife. “Not at all.”

She flips the knife around, cutting off both the top and the bottom. He watches her chop up the rest of the fruit, quick and precise. Her aunt taught her how to do this a long time ago, before she went to France and was living on her own. She suppresses a smile as he watches her with surprised eyes.

When she’s done, she rinses off the knife and places it next to the sink. They sit at her kitchen counter, eating pineapple off the plastic cutting board.

Somehow she’s gotten back to talking about her parents, which surprises her. She can’t remember the last time she talked about them to anyone.

“I need flawless grades for what they want me to do. You know, college, grad school. Or I marry rich. Her words, not mine.”

“Well what do you want?” Hook asks.

“I don’t even know.” “What about you?”

He thinks for a moment, eyes cast down at his hands. His fingers swipe over his hand wound, the circular puncture that sits starkly against his tanned skin.

“There’s this boat for sale down at the docks, the owner’s been trying to sell it for months. I’ve been trying to get the money together. But I’d just take that and sail away somewhere warm. Change my name, make trouble.”

And she can see it, him running through the streets of some Southern city, knife between his teeth, a modern day marauder, laughing and drunk. His life ever changing, never standing still.

When she thinks about her own future, everything looks so stagnant.

“I don’t want to do anything that has to do with my family.” She says. “I’m an only child, but I think my dad’s always wished for a boy, just so he could force the legacy on an heir, you know?”

“Sounds like a load of rich people problems.”

His words pack a ruthless punch. She sucks in her teeth. Suddenly, the kitchen doesn’t feel comfortable anymore.

His face falters when he realizes what he’s said.

“Sorry. That was an asshole thing to say.”

“Yeah, it was.” She replies flatly, jumping down off the stool and moving away from him.

“Really, Aurora.” He says earnestly, closing his hand around her wrist. She’s still mad, but it’s slipping away fast with the way he’s looking at her. “I’m sorry, okay? I’m a dick.”

“It’s fine.”

He lets go of her slowly. There’s a moment when they’re both looking at each other, and the house rings in silence, and she can hear him breathe.

He leans into her, and she can imagine if she just kissed him now, with his guilty expression and the fact that she might actually, maybe, mean something to him.

“I should probably go.” He breaks the silence, releasing her quickly and moving back out the way they’d came.

“Alright.”

She unlocks the door for him, and in both their haste to get to there, they almost knock over the vase of orchids sitting on the key table in the entryway.

It’s painfully awkward.

He’s down the front stairs when he stops for a moment and smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” She replies. She doesn’t close the door until he’s down the street and out of sight.

 

 

 

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His eyes keep blinking closed, no matter how hard he tries to keep them open.

The school building’s heating is way too high, and the lull of his teacher’s monotone lecture makes him feel drowsy. He stares at the ancient too-slow clock, willing time to pass quicker.

In the desk next to him, Jefferson’s snoring, and on his other side some girl’s putting on makeup. He’s gotta get the fuck out of here.

The only reason he came today is because Aurora told him he should, because they had something due for that shit home ec class (learning things he’ll never use a day in his life). And they did.

And the neck of her sweater kept slipping down on one side. There was the pale expanse of skin from the slope of her neck down to her collarbone. He couldn’t stop staring at it.

It was like she was doing it just to torture him, sweeping her hair up out of the way as she leaned over the desk to jot down numbers in her notebook, her stupid pink-polished fingernails.

The bell rings finally, and he swats Jefferson’s arm to wake him up before leaving.

The hallways are too crowded, loud chatty sophomores getting in his way, freshmen scurrying across his path. His backpack has almost nothing in it, he doesn’t even have a notebook, _why is he here?_

Narrowly avoiding a classroom door being flung open in an angry haste by a World History teacher, he debates on whether or not it’d be worth it to stay the rest of the day, when he sees Aurora a few paces away from him talking to -

Gold. _Gold_ , why the fuck is she talking to _Gold?_ His fists ball up.

Belle was there too, and the shithead kept inching toward her while still saying something to Aurora. Belle rolled her eyes but stayed put.

A pencil slips from a notebook in Aurora’s arms and bounces onto the ground. Gold flies down to pick it up off the ground and give it back to her. She smiles a thank you, and he must be having a nightmare.

Aurora suddenly catches his eye, starts to smile and wave.

He turns the corner and disappears.

He mutedly realizes he’s being possessive.

_She’s not yours. She’s not yours. She’s not yours._ He repeats over and over to himself. It doesn’t make him feel any better.

He slams the back door open and stalks out past the dumpsters and the graffiti. Yeah, he should have just stayed home today.

“Who were you just waving too?” Belle asks, peering around her. Aurora turns back to them and sighs.

“Nobody.”

 

 

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A manicured hand knocks on her bedroom door, and then pushes it the rest of the way open.

Aurora pulls the earbuds from her ears and sits up from where she was laying on her bed.

“Honey, why aren’t you packed?” Her mother tuts, opening the door to the closet and pulling out Aurora’s lilac suitcase.

Aurora inconspicuously kicks a mound of dirty clothes under her bed and tucks her phone into the covers of her bed.

“Packed? What are you talking about?”

“The plane leaves in only a few hours.”

“The plane? Where are we going?”

“Did your father not tell you?” The older woman queries, her voice dripping with not-so-well-hidden disdain. “He has business in Rio over the weekend. He requested you go with him, he wants to spend some time together.”

“Mother, it’s Thanksgiving.”

“And you can have a lovely trip to the beach.”

“I don’t want to go to the beach, I want to sit down and have a meal together at home. Like normal families do.”

Her mother straightens up, laying her suitcase on the ground and brushing off her skirt.

“Aurora Melody, your father insists.” She says detachedly.

“I don’t care! Can’t he just make an exception, just this once!?”

Her volume shakes the precariously balanced house. Her mother turns to face her head on, her lips thin and hands clasped.

“You know how bad things have been these past few years. Your father needs to attend these meetings. And that’s final.” She states. “Now stop acting like such a child.”

She rips her hands away from her mother, throwing her bedroom door open and thundering down the stairs. Her mother is calling after her, but she blocks it out, almost falling down her front steps as she starts running down the street. She’s not going anywhere, but she can’t be there.

She trips in her slippers, lets her knitted cardigan flap open as she runs. Tears are slipping out of the corners of her eyes, and she’s not sure whether or not it’s from the sharp, cold wind or her father’s callousness, and the fact that she’s barely seen him since she came back home.

After a while, her feet slow.

She’s wandering around the neighborhood, her toes feeling frozen and her fingers numb. She wishes she’d run into someone. Hook, actually. And that he’d talk to her and she could tell him about her parents and how she didn’t understand why she felt so alone. She’d be able to ask him why he’s intent on giving her emotional whiplash. Ask him if he wants to see a movie sometime. Or just talk. Or more.

She walks toward main street. The streetlights are on, but store windows have all their shades pulled down, and there isn’t another person in sight.

Swallowing, her throat is so dry it hurts. She stares down at her now-dirty slippers, her stomach aching for warm food and an embrace.

 

 

 

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“What’re we drinking tonight?” Jefferson asks, unzipping their black backpack of goods. He hands half of a turkey sandwich to Hook and balances the other half on his knees.

Their Thanksgivings had never been extravagant, but they make do. Barely any of the stores are open, except the shady corner store, so they scrape together enough for a sort-of meal and some booze.

Jefferson pulls his hat down farther over his ears, and rubs his palms together for heat.

“Doesn’t matter. Anything strong.”

“I’ve got some beer and vodka, and rum.” He lists, grip around the necks of the three bottles.

“Rum.” Hook replies almost automatically.

Jefferson passes him the dark bottle and takes the lighter one for himself. Hook blindly unscrews the bottle, his fingers shaking from the chill in the air.

A car’s alarm is going off a few streets over, followed by the barking of a dog and someone yelling out of a window.

Everytime he thinks of her, he’ll take a drink.

_Why does he care if he hurts her feelings?_ (drink) _Where did all this fucking guilt come from?_ (drink) _Why hasn’t he fucked her yet and gotten it over with?_ (drink)

He can feel Jefferson watching him, but grits his teeth through the burn of the drink and stays quiet.

“What’s up with you?” Jefferson finally asks.

“Nothing.”

“Cut the bullshit.” He makes a move to grab the rum bottle, but Hook’s too quick and leans back keeping it out of his reach. “Really.”

“You’re not here to ask me about my feelings.”

“No dickwad, I’m here to be your friend.” His friend says, jumping down off the ledge and carrying his backpack with him. “Happy Thanksgiving.”

“Hey!” He follows him, catching his shoulder.

“What?!”

“I’m sorry.” Hook apologizes. Jefferson crosses his arms over his chest, looking unimpressed. “I’ve been fuckin’ up lately.”

“Okay. You don’t want to talk about it, fine, but can we at least get through the night without you biting my head off?” Jefferson yells, shoving Hook’s chest. “Jesus, ever since last week you’ve been so moody.”

He retreats away from Jefferson, back to where they were sitting before, his knuckles white around the neck of the bottle.

“Is this about Milah?” Jefferson asks quietly, and his grip is so tight it makes his hand tremble.

He lies, “Yes.” And says nothing more.

 

 

 

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The winter solstice dance is held every year at school, and is always abound with paper mache snowflakes and too many popular-kind-assholes.

But Jefferson’s there, taking Ruby, and convinces Hook to come along (he owes him). So he asks some girl named Maura the day before, smoking behind the dumpsters before school starts, filches a tux from Goodwill, and shows up almost an hour late.

He spikes the punch and keeps the rest of the bottle for himself, tucked under his jacket.

From his seat at the far side of the room from the door, he scowls at couples that pass.

A group of football players move past him, and then there she is.

She’s wearing this purple chiffon dress that looks like it costs more than his life. The fabric clings to her body and swishes around her legs, moving like water. Her hair falls around her shoulders in light, chestnut brown waves. Her eyes are wide and bright, regarding the room with a sort of innocent wonder that makes his chest ache. His fingers itch to touch.

He wants to mess up her hair, throw her up against a wall, kiss her until she can’t breathe. She walks like she’s floating.

He rips his eyes away from her.

He takes another drink, grimacing as the acid-alcohol taste goes down his throat. He can’t believe he’s here at all. Stupid Jefferson and his stupid guilt-trip.

“Hook. Come on, let’s go makeout.” Maura’s exasperated voice insists from next to him.

He brushes her off. “In a second.”

She stands there for a moment, face pinched in frustration, before stalking off into the crowd. He tries to care, he really does, but can’t.

Instead, his eyes slide right back to Aurora.

It’s just the thrill of the chace. That’s it. It’s that she’s pure and unattainable and the idea of ruining that innocence gets him off. It’s not her.

It’s not the tender way she touched his hand. It’s not the way she looked like a sweet, wilting daisy but knew how to handle a knife. It’s not the way he feels the need to protect her from men he knows are dangerous.

He stands up from his seat, feeling confused and stifled, and goes outside to the school’s back courtyard. He rips out a pack of cigarettes, but just stares down at them and doesn’t take one out.

The back door opens and he stuffs the pack back in his jacket.

“You should go inside. It’s cold.”

Aurora walks over to stand next to him, knees just barely missing the rim of the ancient, broken fountain in the back of the courtyard.

“I’m fine.” She acknowledges, but he can see her bare shoulders prickling up with goosebumps. He sheds his jacket and drapes it over her shoulders.

“Here.”

She smiles. “Such a gentleman.”

He jokily gasps. “You take that back.”

She rolls her eyes and breathes a laugh, shifting from foot-to-foot.

“Having fun?”

“If wanting to stab yourself in the eye with a fork is fun.” He deadpans, and she laughs. “Who’d you come here with?”

“Nobody.” She answers unapologetically. “Where’s Maura?”

“I don’t know.”

“You should, she’s your date.” She says, but the edge of her words have a bite to them.

He tilts his head, and she meets his eyes.

“I didn’t want her to be.” He admits quietly.

He can see tiny bits of pink color her cheeks, but it might be the cold, and she’s wrapped in his jacket. The sky is dark behind her, and she’s so pretty. He always liked shiny, delicate things that he could never keep.

She tucks a piece of hair behind her ear and swallows thickly.

“Why not?”

He’s moving in closer to her, drawn in like a magnet, a fly to honey.

“I wanted to bring someone else.”

“Oh?” The tips of their noses touch, and she asks, “W-who?”

He moves the last fraction of an inch to close the distance, pressing his lips against hers. It’s sweet for a second, and then unfurls into a flame, devouring her mouth.

She’s so soft in his hands, her cheeks warm and her lips are like rain after a drought.

But the kiss itself lasts barely any time at all before the sound of the metal door being swung open breaks them apart. Ralph, the kid that he used to sell to, sticks his head out, hair parted on the side and cigarette hanging loosely from his mouth.

“Oh, sorry man.” Ralph slurs quickly, his eyes shifting over to Aurora and grinning. “Hey, nice!”

Hook grins back at him, and suddenly a flood of panic washes over her. She steps away from him, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand and gulping in air.  

“This was a mistake.” She mutters. “I can’t - ”

Suddenly, she feels too vulnerable. She looks at him and can’t tell what he’s thinking, his face is stone.

“It was just a kiss, don’t get your panties in a bunch.”

“It - it was just a kiss?” She blurts out.

He shrugs. “Yeah.”

She shakes her head, her sentences clumsy, and she can’t think of what to say. She can feel tears welling up behind her eyes, and she’ll be damned if she lets him see her cry.

He’s just playing her. He’s exactly who she thought he was. And she fell for it.

She goes back into the school, leaving him in the courtyard and not looking back.

 

 

 

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The day they have home ec class that week, she’s sick. She wraps herself in a blanket and doesn’t leave the house that morning, insisting to her mother over the phone that she just threw up and everytime she stood the room went “all wobbly”.

He goes. He stares at her empty seat for a little under twenty minutes, and then bolts.

 

 

 

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She isn’t drunk.

She doesn’t get _drunk_. She’s a little… tipsy. That’s it.

And maybe she was feeling vindictive. Ashley and Belle are somewhere around the living room, Ashley sitting on Thomas’ lap and laughing, playing with his hair, and Aurora needs to get away from that.

The eve of winter break is supposed to go off with a bang, but it’s more of a small-get-together whimper.

She walks through the hallway towards the bathroom, squeezing past a kissing couple she doesn’t know. His words, his face skate through her mind as they have for the past days. She thinks too much about it - maybe she mistook and misunderstood what he was saying? What if he felt something? Felt what she did?

She has his jacket hanging on a hook in her room. At night, she stares at it, and it stares back at her. Mockingly. Smelling like him.

A hand shoots out and roughly grabs her arm. She yelps in surprise, tugged into a darkened closet. Before she can berate the rude person who’s kidnapped her, a light bulb on the ceiling lights up, and her face is inches away from _his_.

Her eyes immediately drop to her shoes. She desperately tries to quell the lump rising in the back of her throat.

“Have you been avoiding me?” He asks softly.

_Yes._

“No.”

“I think you have.”

She can’t handle it.

“I think I haven’t.” She counters. She cuts her eyes to the doorknob inches from her fingertips. She wonders if it would be too obvious if she just bolted.

She feels too much for him.

So when his hands softly rest themselves on her hips, and she’s looking into his eyes and his stupid intoxicating scent winds its way around her, she searches for self control.

She doesn’t find any.

He smashes his lips into hers and she lets herself fall into him, her hands on his shoulders as he shoves her up against the wall.

He’s rough with her, greedy fingers spread wide to touch as much skin as possible. He licks into her mouth hotly, hands sliding up and down her sides as she pushes back.

His tongue is fire, his lips making every molecule in her body scream because she’s never been kissed like this, so aggressive and bold and frantic, like if he didn’t have her this very second he would die.

There’s a thud of something falling off a shelf, and the muffled soundtrack of the party music and people laughing outside the closet. Her heart is beating in her ears and he bites at her bottom lip, making her arch into him, pressing herself against him like a cat.

Her left hand drags through his inky black hair as her right clutches a fistfull of his shirt. The back of her head hits the wall as she bares her throat to him.

He takes the opportunity to drag his teeth down the smooth column of her neck, then following the path with his lips.

He smells like leather and the sea and something _else_. She opens her eyes for a moment, the harsh bare lightbulb lighting the dusty unused closet’s wooden door. She only sees this for a split second before she has to scrunch her eyes shut again and bite her lip to keep herself from moaning as he sucks at her jaw.

He grinds into her, hiding his face in the crook of her neck, mouthing at her skin. She has never felt lust this powerfully before from just kissing. The way her thighs are tensed up and shaking and a hot coil of pleasure is wound in her lower stomach so tightly it’s painful. She suddenly needs everything, needs more of his hands, more of his mouth, his _cock_ , his tongue, him.

Her hands drop limply and then curl around his belt. The metal is cold as she undoes the buckle blindly, getting it off in a frenzied haze. She’s not exactly sure what she’s doing or what she should be doing, only that she wants.

And then he flips up her skirt, and his fingers press against her through her panties, and it’s relief but it also makes her crave more.

He chokes out a breath of air against her neck when she rolls her hips to meet his touch.

But then she’s sharply hit with the reality of what she’s doing - this is a party hookup. This will not mean anything out of the context of right here, right now. He’ll move on, and the fact that he is kissing her right now is just a coincidence of her being in this place at this time.

She is not anything special. She is nothing. And it’s killing her.

“W-wait.” She stutters, hand on his chest, ready to push him away. “Wait a second, wait.”

He pulls away from her instead. “What?”

His mouth is twisted into an guilty frown, as he slides his hands down out from under her skirt. He regards her uneasily, but not unkindly. He looks… concerned. It confuses her.

“Nothing I just - I…” She trails off, distracted by him, her mind completely unable to line up enough words to create a coherent sentence. “We…”

But suddenly it changes, and he’s guarded again, grimacing at her.

“If you’re worried about me _telling_ everyone, then _relax_ princess, I won’t.”

“I wasn’t thinking that.”

“This can just be another _mistake_.” He spits out. “Like the one last week.”

He sounds wounded. And she sees it now, she can see he's just as scared as she is. 

“I didn’t think it was a mistake.” She confesses. “I… I don’t know why I said that. _You_ said it was just a kiss.”

“It was.” His face tells her something different.

She steps closer to him again. “And is that was this is?”

“Yep.”

“Really?” She hears herself whisper. His eyes search her face, conflicted, but not dark anymore. No, they’re and they’re always in motion, like the waves. They don’t stay still. She wants to fall into them.

“ _No._ ”

She almost doesn’t hear it, his lips barely move at all, but it’s there and then it rings in her head like church bells.

“What is it, then?”

“I don’t know.” He mumbles, a second before dragging her back to his lips.


End file.
